Max Raabe and Palast Orchester revive forgotten era
Max Raabe and Palast Orchester revive a fast and funny age in German music
In a tuxedo and bow tie, his hair slicked back, Germany’s Max Raabe is no slouch when he’s on stage. For him, the music has to be perfect, too.
That’s why the well-coiffed crooner never travels without his Palast Orchester, an ensemble of a dozen classically trained musicians, most of whom play multiple instruments.
Their specialty is the music of the 1920s and ’30s, a pre-Nazi golden age in Germany when classical and popular music came together in one elegant, smooth-sounding package.
“The full sound makes things so glamorous,” Raabe said over the phone from Berlin. “You can’t recreate it with one trumpet and a saxophone. It’s wonderful to hear four saxophones and a trombone playing — it’s like seeing old blackand-white pictures from that period. Our orchestra sounds so authentic.”
Raabe, who’s in his 50s, discovered this forgotten era when he was 12. Instead of raiding his brother’s Rolling Stones albums, he dusted off an old 78 in his parents’ collection.
“I was immediately touched by it,” Raabe says. “It was a funny and fast song, but there was a melancholy sub-note that touched me. I had the feeling I was listening to another world, another time, so I collected more of these records.”
In 1985, while studying opera singing at the Berlin University for the Arts, Raabe decided to recruit his classmates to form a group that would specialize in this vintage material, reviving, for example, the music of Germany ’s renowned Comedian Harmonists. The Palast Orchester was an immediate hit, and Raabe never did pursue a role in the opera world.
In addition to the lushness of the sound, part of the reason for the popularity of the music is the humour inherent in the lyrics. Double entendres and other forms of witty wordplay mark the songs, whether they ’re performed in English or German.
“People laugh at the exact same time they laughed 80 years ago because these lyrics are smart,” Raabe says.
The singer writes his own songs in the same style, usually with clever German lyrics, but they’ve also had one-off hits with Palast Orchester versions of pop songs like Tom Jones’s Sex Bomb, which went to the top of the charts in Italy, and Britney Spears’s Oops I Did It Again, which did well in Russia.
Riffing on a pop song is one tried-and-true way to appeal to the masses, but the core of the Palast repertoire has another thing going for it: Many people were inadvertently exposed to the music in their childhood, and it still resonates.
“If you watched Tom and Jerry cartoons, you always hear music like that so everybody is quite familiar with the repertoire,” Raabe says. “Of course, they’re played by all the big bands in the United States. There’s a swing version of each song that we have, but we present them in their original version from 1929 to ’31.
“It’s smooth, but it’s not swing. We bring it in the original style of the early ’30s, which you can’t hear very often (played by) an orchestra of this size.”
Raabe and his orchestra members are frequent flyers, regularly performing 80 or 90 concerts per year for audiences of all ages around the world. Raabe first performed on his own in North America in the early 2000s, and returns with the orchestra almost every year. Next week’s concerts in Ottawa and Montreal will be part of their first visit to Eastern Canada.
Now in their third decade, with more than 20 recordings released, Raabe feels blessed that his singing hobby has turned into a career.
“I’m so thankful I can join the musicians each evening,” he said. “This is light and funny and elegant music, and you don’t have to understand each word to get the message and the feeling of the song. This music is quite familiar to everybody. You will be touched immediately.”